Stunning photography of man's mightiest shame

A 25-year-long documentary of the glorious beauty of destruction.

The first song, The Ballad of Bill Hubbard, on Roger Waters' album Amused to Death begins with an anecdote. It is the story of a wounded soldier asking to be abandoned to die on the battlefield. Told in a matter-of-fact tone by the aged voice of the soldier who abandoned him, it creates a strong counterpoint to the emotion that underlies the story. It evokes sepia-toned images of pain and loss.

Matter-of-fact story telling makes Peter Essick's book, Our Beautiful, Fragile World, an emotional snapshot of environmental tragedies in progress. Essick is a photojournalist for National Geographic who has spent the last 25 years documenting man's devastating impact on the environment. In this respect, Essick has the advantage of Waters in that the visual imagery linked to each story leaves nothing to chance.

Essick has put about a hundred of his most evocative images in a coffee table book. The images range over the world in location. We go from the wilds of Alaska, the Antarctic, and Torres Del Paine National Park in Chile, to the everyday in a Home Depot parking lot in Baltimore and a picnic on the banks of the Patuxent River.

The storytelling complements the imagery very well. Indeed, Essick's matter-of-fact voice lets the reader draw their emotional response from the photos and their relationship to the story. The strongest are often the most mundane. The tragedy of incomplete and unsuccessful cleanup efforts in Chesapeake Bay is made all the more poignant by the image of recreational users enjoying the bay while adding further damage. This is the second theme of the book: even environmental damage can be made to look stunningly beautiful. The infinity room at Idaho Nuclear Engineering and Environmental Laboratory dazzles the eye, while one can't help but stare in wonder at the splendid desolation created by mining the Canadian Oil Sands.

Despite the beauty, though, the overriding tone is one of sadness. Sadness for what we have lost, what we are losing, and what will soon be lost. In some sense, these images are about documenting what we have thrown away. This is a sepia-toned book, even though the images are not. I consider myself to be environmentally aware. I have made efforts to reduce my carbon footprint; I don't own a car; we have reduced the amount of meat in our diet; we read food labels to try to purchase from sustainable sources. Yet, this book makes me realise how much more we have to do, while my own life tells me how hard that actually is.

This book is really a cry for attention. It brings into stark relief the hidden consequences of modern life. Our appetite for energy, for plastics, for food, and for metals is, without doubt, causing huge damage to the Earth. Some of it is local: hard rock mining leaving water not just undrinkable but too acidic to touch and land nearby unusable. Other problems are global: carbon emissions and climate change. Even amidst the evidence of this devastation, Essick remains sympathetic to the people caught in the story; that hard rock mining is done by people who are to be treated with dignity. This aspect of Essick's approach gives his book a humanity that a simple environmental-warrior story would lack.

In only one place does Essick's matter-of-fact approach breakdown. The story of climate change is deeply troubling, and he lets his pessimism and anger leak through. Although these feelings are not discussed directly, Essick—and, indeed many of us—are deeply frustrated by the lack of political will. Although the climate vignettes are too short to capture the issues, the failure of our society to act are laid out in plain sight.

The images are, without exception, stunning, and Essick has done about as well as is possible given the format. And, therein lies my only real complaint about the book. I don't really get on with coffee table books. As you may have guessed from my effusiveness above, I love the photography. The central theme of the book is strong and compelling. The imagery, combined with the vignettes, are individually evocative. But, as with all coffee table books, the individual stories lack a certain... something. A good short story is evocative and complete, while still telling a complex story. The vignettes in coffee table books, however, are more like extended captions. What I want instead is a good short story.

You know, people on both sides of the "climate issue" are woefully undereducated. You know what is the best carbon trap around? Cutting down trees that you've planted that grow to full size in only a few years and making furniture and houses out of them. Around 90% of the weight (not counting water) in wood is carbon that trees photosynthesized from the atmosphere.

If you leave a tree you've planted in the forest to die and rot, all that carbon goes back into the air, and has done nothing.

If you leave a tree you've planted in the forest to die and rot, all that carbon goes back into the air, and has done nothing.

It is really not that complicated.

Apparently it is THAT complicated since you miss something in your explanation. If all the carbon becomes carbon dioxide during the rotting process, how do you explain all the coal, oil and natural gas formed by the forests that "died" several hundreds of millions of years ago?

Not all the carbon in the tree becomes carbon dioxide. Also, it is released over a longer period of time than if you burn it all at once.

If you research the photo, it's actually piles and piles of boreal old-growth.

...that has full Forest Stewardship Council approval.

Given that it is primarily made up of commercial interests, how much can their motives be trusted? Their mission statement sounds impressive, but the evidence of widespread, indiscriminate logging, habitat destruction, and all the other problems is quite apparent.

Guess I miss where harvesting useful timber is shameful. If the timber isn't harvested on a regular basis, we get huge fuel loads.... next thing you know huge fires, which wastes the perfectly usable timber and also costs a lot of money to fight the fires, people die, etc, etc.

You do know they replant right? A well managed forest is a good thing.

If you cut them down they STOP taking carbon out of the atmosphere. I imagine an old growth forest will remove an order of magnitude more carbon than a newly planted clear cut. Not to mention it will maintain habitat for species which seem to be going extinct at an unprecedented rate. I have done the most important thing any given human can do to improve the situation. I am childless by choice.

We're aborting/murdering enough children every day to make Hitler blush, and this is man's greatest shame?

Actually, nature itself causes far more abortions that no one even notices than anything man can do. (That is, unless one attributes the 'creation of life' to God, in which case God is the largest aborter of humans in history.)

And, Godwin aside, how would you feel if Hitler himself had been aborted?

Old-growth/new-growth... the photo makes that irrelevant as it is trying to point out a flaw in the sustainability claim which is that the shear volume found within the width of one camera's eye renders the claim false.

What a goof. The earth is here for us, we are not here for the earth. Care for it and use it for your purposes while you still have time. Enjoy it, but don't make it your god. Feel free to cavalierly dismiss the author of this foolish post.

Ummm.... No, Earth was here billions of years before the ascendancy of man and will remain for billions more once we are departed.

There was a massive flood in some European country and they collected up all the fallen trees and stored them in MASSIVE piles on some abandoned runway.

What, do you work for some massive-cover-uppy Conservative Spin Think-tank? Cursory research of the photo or photographer proves you are trolling/misinforming.

edit:

“Near Winnipeg in Manitoba, I took an aerial photo of a log yard of old-growth trees from the boreal forest. Scientists now know that the boreal forest plays a key role in the future of climate change."

Guess I miss where harvesting useful timber is shameful. If the timber isn't harvested on a regular basis, we get huge fuel loads.... next thing you know huge fires, which wastes the perfectly usable timber and also costs a lot of money to fight the fires, people die, etc, etc.

You do know they replant right? A well managed forest is a good thing.

I 100% agree. Wood is an amazing resource. Planting, maintaining, and harvesting wood like a crop is hugely 'environmental' and its' very frustrating that every time a treehugger sees a felled tree they think it's bad.

HOWEVER....Cutting an old-growth forest (of which their aren't many left and take thousands of years to rebuild the ecosystem that is destroyed) is not "managing them well". Old Growth forests are unique and very complex ecosystems. They don't come back after you replant. (not within a timeline that matters to humans, at least)

It'd be roughly equivalent to draining a lake to harvest the water and refilling it over 2-300 years. The ecosystem that was there before is gone and isn't coming back just because you "refilled" it.

Finally, God doesn't cause abortions. Research Original Sin to determine the correct answer.

Wait... did you just tell intelligent science-minded people to do research on "original sin" - a allegorical story from the the first book of the bible, a book that, itself, is highly suspect, full of conflicting stories, and resistant to actual 'research'?

Regardless of your belief in a higher power or not...that's just silly.

Old-growth/new-growth... the photo makes that irrelevant as it is trying to point out a flaw in the sustainability claim which is that the shear volume found within the width of one camera's eye renders the claim false.

Old growth matters, because destroying an ancient forest is a tragedy in itself, even if that destruction is useful to humans. Better to re-harvest new forests if we can. But what does scale have to do with it? When I see that photo, I just think "How huge is the Canadian economy when measured in trees! What a grand thing is Mankind". Just because it looks big doesn't mean it is unstainable, is it somehow impossible to grow that many trees?

In the end the numbers that really matter are not the forests that are merely logged, but those which are converted into farmland. I think that accounts for many more trees than logging, and I know that those trees are not replaced.

But I NEEEEED my 5000 square foot poorly built house that looks good for 10 years and then falls apart in the new development on rich used-to-be-farmland 45 minutes from where I work! I NEEEED it! That way I have room for all my stuff I also 'NEEEEED'.

Definitely. My thought was that the photograph's point was to show the immense scale of deforestation going on and when we bandy about terms such as sustainability or re-planting we do not fully comprehend the amounts and scale of the issue. We cannot simply replace that amount of de-forestation. Especially considering it is old-growth.

Much like the Grand Banks off of Newfoundland. The lay-person does not understand how much fish we removed from that eco-system. We cannot picture or imagine it.

Honestly I see this as a perfect example of what is wrong with the environmental movement today. These are pictures and topics designed to make you feel not think and that is never the basis for solid sustainable policy. Kudos to the review that calls out the coffee table book format for its evocative, and compelling but not complex it reduces issues of great depth to a reaction of "Oh that's horrible". Add to that that rather than tackling a singular theme such as habitat and species loss or climate change, it instead attempts a scatter-shot of problems without any examination of how interconnected it all is.

All in all this sort of thing is I suppose good for awareness in truth I can't help but wonder if it in fact more serves to assuage the consciences of the likely wealthy predominantly american audience without challenging their actual lifestyle choices. What is the carbon footprint of these glossy pages? The shipping of heavy paper books? The trees felled to make that paper and the pollution given off from the printing and manufacturing of those vivid inks?

Awareness is all well and good but this will be consumed by those who already think themselves to be environmentalists this will change few minds and those it does will not be stirred to effective action just wasteful agitation of how bad these things are.

Of course, Ars readers walk or bicycle to work doing pro-bono work for environmental law firms, grow their own vegetables, and power their zero-emission homes with solar panels right? ;-)

I kid.... I kid.

I gave you a vote because you raise a good point. The hypocrisy of it all. But the world is not black and white like some want it to be. You don't have to be either a tree-hugger or the opposite. You can fall somewhere in between. This photograph is just asking people to consider their situation and our situation as a whole and what can be done.

There are infinite things that can be done better than we are doing now. And the sad part is most of the terrible environmental impact things we do are solely to get a few more bucks for shareholders. They do not affect consumers or producers just the people they sadly answer to.

Chris Lee / Chris writes for Ars Technica's science section. A physicist by day and science writer by night, he specializes in quantum physics and optics. He lives and works in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.